Apple Hides Samsung Apology So It Can’t Be Seen Without Scrolling

Classic. Check it out for yourselves.

This reeks of Steve Jobs’s anti-establishment thinking.

Over at FiveThirtyEight, statistician Nate Silver has been aggregating and analyzing polling data in order to predict the outcome of this year’s presidential election. What a person will notice from his, and other analyses done by observers trying their best to be objective, is that the race has not been as close as the media would have you believe. President Obama can lose tomorrow, but Silver’s model has the race as anything but a tossup. See this mornings predictions below:

What Silver has been doing in this, and past elections, is try to get past the noise of pundits and news organizations that offer predictions without really delving into the complexity of the available data. It’s not new, but he has shown that even the best news organizations are still operating from their own self-interests, painting the race as much closer than it really is in a not-totally-concsious effort to keep the race exciting. I’m a big fan of news media, especially newspapers, having grown up in a household with both parents employed by newspapers. But while news organizations are invaluable in reporting things that have already happened, they are generally weak in their predictive capacities. To its credit, the New York Times recognized this, which is why they bought FiveThirtyEight.com and it now resides in their domain.

Silver has been catching a lot of heat over his model, which hasn’t had the president at less than a 75% of victory since June. This weekend, Silver wrote an excellent piece defending his work. From the column:

…we’ve about reached the point where if Mr. Romney wins, it can only be because the polls have been biased against him. Almost all of the chance that Mr. Romney has in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, about 16 percent to win the Electoral College, reflects this possibility.

Yes, of course: most of the arguments that the polls are necessarily biased against Mr. Romney reflect little more than wishful thinking.

Nevertheless, these arguments are potentially more intellectually coherent than the ones that propose that the leader in the race is “too close to call.” It isn’t. If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can’t acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.

That’s some tough language, especially considering his employers are being more conservative in their analysis. It’s obvious that Silver believes in his predictive model, and that confidence is not unfounded, having predicted the outcome correctly in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 election. If that election got him noticed, this election has gotten him scrutiny.

If all a person does is absorb the work of editorial writers, op-ed pieces, and bloviating cable pundits, Silver must look like he’s out of his mind. Or worse, that he’s little more than a paid operative of a biased liberal media. The only evidence of that, however, is how a reader reacts to his numbers, which is no evidence at all (in fact, the opposite argument could have been made in 2010, when Silver predicted, and was correct about, massive losses for the Democrats in the House).

Silver has a lot on the line with tomorrow’s outcome. Along with watching the returns tomorrow, I’ll be watching to see how they line up with Silver’s predictions. What I’m watching for is not so much a win for Silver, but a loss for punditry. There’s so much poison on the airwaves, in print and online masquerading as truth that getting skewered by some objective analysis is sorely needed. Well-considered opinion has a place in the public debate, but faulty predictions of outcomes based on little to no evidence and biased to a speaker’s agenda, whether it be political or monetary, needs a countervailing force. That’s what Silver provides, and why I imagine he will be quite satisfied come tomorrow night, even if Romney manages to beat the odds.

via Instagram

I was walking down Mission Street in San Francisco earlier today and I came across an ad for the Microsoft Surface on the side of a building. It featured a series of three wireframe-y illustrations of Surface tablets with different, brightly-colored keyboards underneath each.

Seeing these ads made me realize Microsoft isn’t so much promoting their touch keyboard feature as they are diverting attention away from the actual product, the tablet.

It’s like running an ad for a new convertible car, but drawing everyone’s attention to the optional hard top.

David Rohde at The Atlantic, on the inequality in New York exposed by Hurricane Sandy:

A hotel bellman said he was worried about his mother uptown. A maid said she had been calling her family in Queens. A garage attendant said he hadn’t been able to contact his only relative – a sister in New Jersey – since the storm hit. Asked where he weathered the hurricane, his answer was simple.

“I slept in my car,” he said.

Sandy humbled every one of the 19 million people in the New York City metropolitan area. But it humbled some more than others in an increasingly economically divided city.

As they point out in the article, everyone is getting hit hard in the aftermath of the hurricane, just some are getting hit harder than others.

No reason to stop posting great New York links.

How about Anthony Bourdain with Talib Kweli in Brooklyn.

Hell yeah.

(thanks bro)

From Jason Kottke:

Publishing on kottke.org is suspended until further notice. The situation in New York and New Jersey is still dire** so posting stupid crap seems frivolous and posting about the Sandy aftermath seems exploitive. Information is not what people need right now; people need flashlights, candles, drinking water, safety, food, access to emergency medical care, a warm place to sleep, etc.

Interesting he identifies his site content as “stupid crap.”

In the face of dire living conditions, it’s amazing how much of what we do seems so pointless.

See, this is what happens. I moved out of NYC in April all this bad stuff happens. First it’s Hurricane Sandy and now my friend Victor switches from an iPhone to a Samsung Galaxy Note:

The good news is he hasn’t totally lost his mind, as he’s ready to “hit the EJECT button” if things don’t go well:

So I’ll make the switch but with two huge EJECT buttons: 1) If I find i’m not using the stylus enough (maybe it’s like the Pepsi Challenge in that it seems better at first, but you have to live with it for a while to truly judge), if adopting a new music ecosystem is too cumbersome. As I write this I’m reminded of the brilliant Samsung commercials with the hipsters in line for the new Apple product release bemoaning the feature gap… If the iPhone 6 comes out and closes the gap, there’s still one thing that Apple has that no one else does… the “Apple Experience” – and that’s a competitive differentiator.

*Regarding his observation of his Samsung not being as ‘smooth’ as his iPhone. I think this has less to do with the screen type and more with the fact that Android wasn’t designed for animation. With iOS, everything you see on the screen is built on top of Core Animation. This is why animations are smooth even on first generation iPhones.

People generating power by bicycle to charge their devices after Hurricance Sandy left a good chunk of NYC without power:

This is why I love New York.

Incredible time-lapse video of Hurricane Sandy from the top of the New York Times building.

via FBU

Ars Technica: ATM heist clears $1 million exploiting Citigroup e-payment flaw:

“In order to obtain the case, the conspirators exploited a loophole in Citi’s account security protocols, which caused Citi’s account reconciliation systems to treat identical, near-simultaneous withdrawals as duplicates of a single withdrawal from an individual Citi Checking account,” prosecutors alleged in the indictment. “In exploiting this loophole, the conspirators withdrew identical sums of money in succession from a single Citi checking account all within a specific time window. This allowed the conspirators to fraudulently withdraw several times the amount of money deposited into each account.”

Sounds like it’s right out of a movie.

Today DE is exclusively premiering somersetVII’s latest homage to Stanley Kubrick. Not many can summarize the work of the master quite like somersetVII has done. Not only does he illuminate the links between these largely misunderstood films, he also provides a glimpse into the world of Stanley Kubrick the photographer. It is a work of art in and of itself.

A film is—or should be—more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

—Stanley Kubrick